Hindu Rituals and Gumbo Limbo Spirituals
Chapter Six of "I Don't Love Nobody": Hidden Stories from Bob Dylan's Rough and Rowdy Ways
Author’s note: If you’re new here, please start at the beginning. The whole thing might make more sense.
This chapter is a far different essay than what appeared in draft previously, as “I Know All the Hindu Rituals.” I have cut the speculation and I have kept the facts. I hope it is now more clear and more logical. Paradoxically, I realize it is still absolutely crazy. Which makes sense, because, as Dylan tells us about his liminal city of “Key West,” “If you lost your mind, you’ll find it there.”
Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness …
— T.S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton"
If you do not expect the unexpected, you will not find it.
— Heraclitus
I play the gumbo limbo spirituals
I know all the Hindu rituals
People tell me I’m truly blessed
— Bob Dylan, “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)”
Rough and Rowdy Ways is a record of muses and prophets, disguised and in plain sight, from Marilyn Monroe to Billy Emerson, from Walt Whitman to Stevie Nicks. In “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” Bob also includes, covertly, a reflection of his own inspiration over a young person’s life—a boy born in St. Paul in the very moment Zimmerman became Dylan in a cafe just across the Mississippi River. In this chapter I offer more detail about how the artist used imagery from my memoir, The Golden Bird, to tell a story about the spiritual power of song in “Key West (Philosopher Pirate).”
In Chapter One, I discussed how the third line in the triplet above comes directly from a moment in my book when, after hearing on the radio that John Lennon has been assassinated, I listen to a hymn with the refrain, “Everything’s a blessing, so count your blessings.” I described how, despite the words being small comfort when faced with the loss of a musical hero, I stick to my path of Christian asceticism. In this chapter I show how the other two strange phrases in this half-verse—”gumbo limbo spirituals” and “Hindu rituals”—also concern the mysteries of faith and the transformative power of song.
My analysis relies, as ever, on an investigation into Dylan’s precise images. Upon the release of Rough and Rowdy Ways, in a New York Times interview, Dylan replied to a question about the song “I Contain Multitudes,” by saying:
The lyrics are the real thing, tangible, they’re not metaphors.
And in reply to a question about the diverse characters included, he said:
The names themselves are not solitary. It’s the combination of them that adds up to something more than their singular parts.
Let’s see how the names in this triplet add up. The gumbo limbo tree is a tropical species native to the west coast of Florida. It is humorously called the "tourist tree" for its peeling bark reminiscent of a sunburned visitor. And a “spiritual” is a song of praise. Here Dylan “plays” it, like Wolfman Jack “plays” all those songs in “Murder Most Foul,” which are also hymns of a sort, offering solace as JFK bleeds out and the “age of the AntiChrist” begins. Dylan uses the verb “to play” only one other time in “Key West (Philosopher Pirate),” in the penultimate verse, when the narrator says “I play both sides against the middle.” In Chapter One, I showed how this line alludes to songs by Lennon, including “God,” unearthed by the pirate from the pages of my obscure manuscript.
So how does the musician play a spiritual about a Florida tree with strange visual characteristics? Here we need to consider another side of Bob Dylan: the joke lover. The news site Expecting Rain has a page devoted to Bob’s older onstage quips and you can google dozens more. He often inserts puns into songs, from the funny, “I’m stark naked… I’m hunting bare” in “Honest with Me,” to mystical references in “Key West (Philosopher Pirate).” As I’ve shown, the phrase “I don’t love nobody” is both a 19th Century racist minstrel song, redeemed by Elizabeth Cotten in the 1950s, and a play on the word “nobody,” taken from an episode of astral sex in The Golden Bird. That one is pretty good, but my favorite, as you might recall, is how Dylan, in the line “I’m so deep in love that I can hardly see,” puns on the disposal of my eyeglasses to express an ecstatic vision and add a note of self-deprecating humor.
These Rough and Rowdy Ways jokes and references are so deeply buried that I’m sure many readers will doubt they exist at all, and “gumbo limbo spirituals” (have you worked it out yet?) is no exception. But for those familiar with Dylan’s history of love and theft, such hidden treasure should not be surprising. Dylan the trickster has been teasing and testing us since 1961, daring us to look behind the curtain. In advance of Rough and Rowdy Ways, he offered another multi-layered pun: “stay observant”—a reminder that we should delve beneath the surface of his images, an allusion to the spiritual theme of the album, and perhaps an admonition similar to the one he includes on “Black Rider”: “let all your earthly thoughts be a prayer.”
So what’s the joke here? In the liminal city of “Key West,” on the “horizon line” of another world, the wandering minstrel Dylan plays the “gumbo limbo spirituals.” The sunburned spirituals. The Son-burned spirituals.
And what is that supposed to mean?
As I’ve shown, in “Key West (Philosopher Pirate),” Dylan takes the listener through transformative moments in his life, down “Mystery Street,” with a long stop in the gospel years. The music of that era was defined by the passion of Dylan’s faith, on the albums certainly, but most brilliantly in the live shows. His vocals on songs like “I Believe in You” convey urgency and immediacy, as if Jesus is about to step out from behind the clouds. His gospel raps from the period are fire and brimstone in their insistence that the Lord is on His way and the End is nigh. As I shared in Chapter One—in a mirror from The Golden Bird that shines back in the chorus of “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)”—Dylan accepted that many of his old fans thought he had “lost his mind.” He didn’t care. He was so deep in love he could hardly see.
From late 1978 through 1980, Dylan was caught in a blaze of searing light. From a May, 1979 interview:
Jesus put his hand on me. It was a physical thing. I felt it. I felt it all over me. I felt my whole body tremble. The glory of the Lord knocked me down and picked me up.
But despite the apocalyptic sermons Dylan issued from the stage, despite the paperback prophecies of Hal Lindsey, the world didn’t end. Instead, the singer was left with the skin peeling from his chest and cheeks. He was left to wander the wilderness of the Eighties making albums like Empire Burlesque and Down in the Groove. He was left Son-burned.
Over the next forty years, Dylan continued to write songs of faith, but in his mid and late period lyrics, the Lord is no longer so close at hand. Dylan has never again written a straightforward gospel song, like “What Can I Do For You,” from Saved, a track that dramatically conveys the living presence of Christ. From “I and I” on Infidels, to “Narrow Way” on Tempest, Dylan instead describes the distance between the narrator and his Savior, and a longing for reunion. These songs are “gumbo limbo spirituals.”
Time Out of Mind contains a couple of the best. Like the great Persian poets Rumi and Hafiz, Dylan often speaks to God as if He were a lover, but unlike those poets, Dylan writes from a country blues point of view, like a man forsaken. Combining Biblical language and vernacular phrases from old songs, the singer delivers tender tales that appeal to our romantic sensibilities, but more deeply, express feelings of spiritual loss and yearning.
In “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven,” for example, Dylan sings:
You broke a heart that loved you
Now you can seal up the book and not write anymore
I’ve been walking that lonesome valley
Trying to get to Heaven before they close the door
The second line alludes to a prophecy about the last days from the Old Testament Book of Daniel:
But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end: many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.
and also the New Testament Book of Revelations:
And he said to me, “Do not seal the words of the prophecy of this book, for the time is at hand.
The word “lonesome,” in the third line, is a standard in hillbilly songs, appearing in any number of Hank Williams and Carter Family compositions. And perhaps the most famous “valley” in the Bible appears in Psalm 23:
Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.
In “Can’t Wait,” Dylan cries “how much longer” at the end of each verse. These words echo a plea found in old spirituals, asking Christ to hasten His coming. Dylan also included the phrase, just prior to his Christian conversion, in the sexually charged “New Pony” from Street Legal. It doesn’t appear in the official lyrics, but the back-up singers chant “how much longer,” also at the end of each verse. In “Crossing the Rubicon,” the singer completes the circle:
What are these dark days I see in this world so badly bent
How can I redeem the time - the time so idly spent
How much longer can it last - how long can this go on
I embraced my love put down my head and I crossed the Rubicon
And “Crossing the Rubicon” leads directly to the spiral stairway of “Nearer My God to Thee,” on the album’s next cut, “Key West (Philosopher Pirate).”
In “Can’t Wait,” the singer understands that his very life is dependent on his “lover”: “my heart can’t go on beating without you.” He is “breathing hard, standing at the gate,” and in the last verse, the one that begins with “It’s mighty funny, the end of time has just begun,” he claims he “left my life with you, somewhere back there along the line.”
In Dylan’s songs from his post-gospel decades, we hear a from a believer who has an intimacy with scripture. But the narrator doesn’t live in heaven yet, or even in the colorful “land of Oz;” he lives in a troubled land of violence and suffering, an unrelenting place of black and white misery. In “Scarlet Town,” from Tempest, Dylan revisits “Barbara Allen,” a folk song from his youth, and updates it with extra layers of anguish. Once again, the “end is near,” with “beggars crouching at the gate.” Jesus appears, but only in the past tense:
I touched the garment but the hem was torn
The line alludes to a passage from the Gospel of Luke, in which a woman who touches the fringe of Jesus’ garment is healed. In “Scarlet Town,” however, the fabric has come off in the narrator’s hand and the Lord has disappeared around a corner, just ahead. Through the gate.
Another “gumbo limbo spiritual,” “Ain’t Talkin’,” from Modern Times, puts up a mirror to one of Dylan’s self-professed favorite gospel-era songs, “In the Garden.” In the latter, the narrator asks a series of questions about Christ that evoke His presence, including one directed at the soldiers who arrested Him in Gethsemane: “Did they know He was the Son of God, did they know that He was Lord?” In both songs, we are hanging out in a garden, a sacred place, but in “Ain’t Talkin’,” only betrayal and heartache remain:
As I walked out tonight in the mystic garden
The wounded flowers were dangling from the vines
I was passing by yon cool and crystal fountain
Someone hit me from behind
Ain’t talkin’ - just walkin’
through this weary world of woe
Heart burnin’ - still yearnin’
No one on earth would ever know
They say prayer has the power to help
so pray for me mother
In the human heart an evil spirit can dwell
I’m trying to love my neighbor and do good unto others
but oh, mother, things ain’t goin’ well
Thirty-six years on from “In the Garden,” where’s the gardener? He’s gone.
Start looking for “gumbo-limbo spirituals” and you’ll find a bunch. “Ring Them Bells” and “Shooting Star” from Oh Mercy are great ones. Along with “Narrow Way,” Tempest delivered “Duquesne Whistle” and “Pay in Blood.” The best of all might be “Blind Willie McTell.” I won’t go through all the details here, just look for that telling combo: a narrator moving through a world ruled by “power and greed and corruptible seed” while holding the distant light of the promised land in his eye.
In his “gumbo limbo spirituals,” the singer has many lonesome and sunburned miles to walk before he again meets his King. He mostly “ain’t talkin,’” because “no one on earth would ever know.” But he is singing, and in “Key West (Philosopher Pirate),” Dylan finally describes a place on the precipice of a reunion:
Key West is the place to be
If you’re lookin’ for immortality
Key West is paradise divine
Now let’s think about those “Hindu rituals.” If, according to my thesis of Rough and Rowdy Ways, song is the spiritual force that helps us live through trouble on our earthly plane, a force that helps us finally “get to Heaven,” how are “Hindu rituals” involved? And how do they “add up” with “gumbo limbo spirituals” and being “truly blessed?”
In earlier chapters I’ve mentioned a line from “False Prophet” that echos a key concept from the the “Celestial Song” of Hinduism, the Bhagavad Gita:
Can’t remember when I was born and I forgot when I died
I’ve also offered two translations of this line’s source. Here’s a third, one that appears in the liner notes for George Harrison’s last record, Brainwashed:
There never was a time when you or I did not exist. Nor will there be any future when we shall cease to be.
Dylan also references the language of the Bhagavad Gita in “My Own Version of You”:
I study Sanskrit and Arabic to improve my mind
I want to do things for the benefit of all mankind
It’s clear that Dylan was thinking about Hinduism when he wrote the lyrics on Rough and Rowdy Ways. But what exactly are “Hindu rituals?” Let’s look again to Bob’s good friend George:
The Lord is awaiting on you all to awaken and see
By chanting the names of the Lord and you’ll be free
—“Awaiting On You All”
Chanting mantras to quiet the ordinary processes of the mind and summon a higher state of consciousness is a basic practice of Hinduism. The repetition of holy names focuses the mind on the Atman, or true self, which is Spirit, relieves the distractions and worries of the day-to-day, and like other forms of meditation, invites a calmer and wider perspective. If you’re not familiar with practice, check out Krishna Das, who travels the world offering participatory sessions of such chanting, called “kirtans.”
Like a mantra, “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” is an incantation, inducing a transporting dream, and not primarily because of the meanings. Listeners don’t need to understand the allusions—any of the background I’ve explored in this book—to be swept out of the ordinary and through “the gateway key to innocence and purity” (by the way, there’s that “gate” again, and now it’s open). Bob’s phrasing, the minimalist and haunting music, and the simple loveliness of the images take us to “paradise divine.” Bob has devised his song, in form and musical quality—the hypnotic accordion, the soothing vocal, the repetition of certain words—to have enchanting properties similar to the sacred Hindu text he alludes to directly in the lyrics.
The “Hindu ritual” of “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” is a bridge, from the “gumbo limbo spirituals” of Dylan’s great second act, back to God. A song that is packed with allusions to the spiritual power of song also conveys, through form and pattern, the spiritual power of song. Like “Mystery Street,” like the “radio signal clear as can be,” like McKinley’s “last request” of “Nearer My God to Thee,” and like the secular Lennon songs covertly referred to in “I play both sides against the middle,” a “Hindu ritual” connects us to “paradise divine.” It is another sort of hymn, showing us, that through death and despair, if we have faith, we remain “truly blessed.”
Did Dylan have a specific source for the idea of “Hindu rituals?” One that makes sense within the context of the song and the album? As I’ve shown throughout this book, most of the allusions on Rough and Rowdy Ways can be traced to cultural and biographical facts, and to other artists.
I’d like to suggest, based on the evidence, that Dylan’s “Hindu rituals” originate in T.S. Eliot’s mid-life spiritual masterpiece, Four Quartets, a work that owes much to Vedic scriptures. We know that Eliot is alluded to elsewhere on Rough and Rowdy Ways. In the previous chapter, I discussed how the lyricist borrowed the phrase “redeem the time” from “Ash-Wednesday” for “Across the Rubicon.” It’s in the same verse I’ve cited above, that contains the plea “How much longer.”
Eliot was well-versed in “Hindu rituals.” Before moving to England for graduate work, the St. Louis born poet studied Sanskrit and ancient Indian texts at Harvard. Eliot concluded his first major work, The Waste Land, with the Sanskrit mantra:
Shanti shanti shanti
This chant, always included as a formal ending to an Upanishad (a Vedic religious text) is translated—inadequately, but the best a Latin-based language can do—as “The peace which passeth understanding,” and is recited at the close of all important rituals such as weddings and cremations.
The Bhagavad Gita is a dialogue between Prince Arjuna and Krishna, who is a manifestation of the Hindu god Vishnu, the Preserver. In the cycle of Four Quartets—“Burnt Norton, “East Coker,” “the Dry Salvages,” and “Little Gidding,” all named for places with spiritual import to Eliot—the poet meditates on the Divine Song’s key ideas: the ever-presence of past and future and the concept of right action. Eliot quotes the sacred text directly in “The Dry Salvages.” These concepts, and others he explores—such as the thin membrane separating the world of the living from the world of the dead—are core, as well, to the themes of Dylan’s song.
Recall Dylan’s extensive series of lyrics on Rough and Rowdy Ways with references to “nothin’,” “nothing,” “nobody,” and “none” that I shared in the last chapter. Recall how in “False Prophet,” Dylan says that he is “nothin’ like my ghostly appearance would suggest.” Steve Ellis, in his essay on Four Quartets in The New Cambridge Companion to T.S. Eliot, writes that one of Eliot’s themes in Four Quartets is that our existence is “ghost-like” and that we are trapped behind a “temporal barrier.” Reality is on the other side.
Time cracks open in both poems. Dylan’s “Key West” is a place on the threshold of another world, the place of Jacob’s ladder from Genesis. (Similarly, the entirety of “Murder Most Foul” seems to happen outside of linear time, often in JFK’s dying mind.) “Key West” is a place where you can hear about the death of William McKinley on a radio that doesn’t yet exist. Or, as Eliot says to open the first poem in his cycle:
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
The intertextuality between the two poems is also, vitally, indicated by pattern. Eliot’s verse is intentionally musical. The title is an obvious clue to this purpose, although for Eliot the four instruments of each quartet are air, water, earth, and fire. For its structure, the poet took clues not only from the Bhagavad Gita, but also Beethoven and Dante’s Divine Comedy.
In performance, Four Quartets has the effect of ritual. If you listen to a reading of the poem by a skilled orator, the spell of the musicality is transfixing. Here’s a good rendition on YouTube read by Alec Guinness, and a recently filmed version starring Ralph Fiennes, based on a stage play, is outstanding. Since ancient days, rituals have used song to transport participants from a mundane, everyday consciousness into an awareness of other worlds. Eliot’s poem, read aloud, creates a visionary state. Again, sequential time loses solidity. And it works even if the meaning of the words is not fully comprehended. You may take part in the ritual with no sense of the allusions, to the Bhagavad Gita or otherwise. The images, the meter, the rhythm of the poetry, and the intonations of the performer work together to take the listener from the ordinary to the sacred. Sound familiar? As I’ve shown, “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” shares these qualities.
The Gospel also runs deep in both “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)” and Four Quartets. Eliot’s poem, despite the Hindu influences, is primarily a Christian work. Eliot was a practicing member of the Anglican Church when he wrote the cycle, and besides the Bhagavad Gita, his other primary allusions are to The Ascent of Mount Carmel by St. John of the Cross, The Cloud of Unknowing—the anonymous work of a Christian mystic—and the writings of St. Julian of Norwich. Like Dylan, Eliot, in sourcing his poems, visited the morgues and monasteries.
Beyond all of these commonalities of theme and effect, the writing of the Ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus provides a direct link between the two poems. Here’s the epigraph at the top of Four Quartets (Eliot reprints it in the Greek):
Although wisdom is common, the many live as if they have a wisdom of their own.
The way up and the way down are the same.
The message of the first line is reflected over and over through the lyrics of Rough and Rowdy Ways and “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)”: all creativity is recycled, down through time, renewed by inspiration from those who have come before. Usually what we call originality is when someone puts an old truth into fresh words.
But on Rough and Rowdy Ways, Dylan does more than allude to Heraclitus abstractly. From “I Contain Multitudes”:
Everything’s flowing, all at the same time
This is from the most famous saying attributed to the philosopher (although modern scholars have doubts he actually said it): “everything flows.” Here’s another adage from Heraclitus:
No man ever steps in the same river twice.
And from Dylan’s “Black Rider”:
The road that you’re on — same road that you know
But it’s not the same as — it was a minute ago
Can we write up all these connections between Rough and Rowdy Ways and Four Quartets to coincidence? Two great minds on similar paths? That seems a stretch, given our magpie bard’s well-established proclivities. It is especially unlikely once we consider a final intersection between the two works: you guessed it, my unknown memoir, The Golden Bird.
In Chapter One, I shared how Dylan’s set at Blackbushe, which I experienced as a naive young man, sent me tumbling out of time, into another world of heightened perception and spiritual seeking. I shared how I was rescued with a bloody head from a ditch by a woman who was a vision from a song. I described how I changed my life and set out on a new path, away from the influence of my conservative upbringing. I tell how I pledged to follow Dylan’s “dancing spell” from “Mr. Tambourine Man.”
Here’s the thing: Marie’s first gift to me was a copy of Four Quartets. In my text, I describe how as a young man, full of energy and desire, I wrestled with Eliot’s poetry of asceticism and surrender:
“Shall I say it again?
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are
not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.”
This hardly seemed fair. I’d only just tasted ecstasy. But the poem had an otherworldly quality and I succumbed easily to its cadence and images. Eliot made me feel that this summer garden, with its ripening fruit and tangled tendrils, was just a beautiful façade, a surface sheen on a more subtle, more true existence.
In the opening sections of The Golden Bird, Dylan’s musical performances and Eliot’s Four Quartets are the “Hindu rituals” that launch me into a new life.
They come together again, dramatically, in the penultimate section, called “Katabatic Wind.” In the late 1980s, long past my adventures in radical Christianity, I lived for a few years in Boulder, Colorado. Here’s an excerpt from this chapter, taking place in a cafe, just after I have a conversation with my friend who works the counter, Mary Jo (By the way, I had no idea she had moved to “Frankfort!”):
In Boulder, the mystical is represented by seekers of all kinds. You can yoga and chant in a hundred flavors. A Tibetan Buddhist community is linked to a school of arts and meditation called the Naropa Institute. Naropa offers writing courses at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics—a name imagined by founding faculty member and seasonal Boulder resident Allen Ginsberg. He was a pal of Kerouac’s and an essential link between generations of poets. Ginsberg’s visionary song-poems carried the spirits of Whitman and Blake into the Atomic Age. He would only be superseded by his younger friend Bob Dylan as the preeminent bard of the late century.
…
Rich walked in, gliding toward me behind his round, thick-lensed purple shades.
I said, “Hey man, did I tell you I met Ginsberg at Naropa the other day?” I had been taking a poetry class.
“Really? Was he burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamic in the machinery of night?’
“Possibly. He didn’t say. He did however put his hand on my knee and wish me well.”
“You know that means he wanted to have anal sex with you.”
“Possibly. But it was really sort of grandfatherly.”
“He wanted to have grandfatherly anal sex with you.”
“Man I think you’re still jealous he was made “King of Prague” instead of you.”
“Possibly.”
“Want to go get stoned?”
Dylan calls out to his Beat friends and inspirations in the fourth verse of “Key West (Philosopher Pirate)”:
I was born on the wrong side of the railroad track
Like Ginsberg, Corso and Kerouac
My years in Boulder were informed by the intellectual, poetic, and mystic energy symbolized by Naropa, and by the natural beauty of the Colorado mountains. My chapter describes friendships and romantic relationships in this period. It tells about the inspiration of poets and authors—Eliot, Neruda, Rilke, Doris Lessing—and the inspiration of singers—Patti Smith, Kate Bush, Hüsker Dü. My friend Rich was a painter, a poet, and an excellent conversationalist. We walked and talked for hours:
Together, our antennae were always quivering for odd confluences and synchronistic moments—Carl Jung’s concept of non-causal interplay between the phenomenal world and the human psyche. The common name for it, one that connotes meaninglessness, is coincidence. But to us, it was a form of magic. My belief in the supernatural, which had subsided during the dull wet years in Olympia, had reemerged in the charged atmosphere of the Rock Mountains, among the Buddhists and the freethinkers.
I thought if a person had enough will, he could make synchronicity happen. In my mind, it had become a dangerous kind of game. I no longer believed that a human, at least one living a physical life on earth, could remake himself as an image of Christ. But hidden forces and tensions, wound on the coils of desire—a nearly sexual longing for transcendence—seemed tucked away, ready to explode in every café and canyon of this high electric land. When a spring storm blew through and the thin dry air crackled, it felt like the sky itself might tear open and characters from stories and creatures that had died might appear in the foothills and walk into town.
In this chapter, I fall in love and I am betrayed. As we’ve seen, betrayal is a topic that interests Dylan. From “False Prophet”:
I’ve searched the world over for the Holy Grail
I sing songs of love - I sing songs of betrayal
The search for the Grail is the rhyme and the inverse of “betrayal.” Recall references to betrayal in “I Contain Multitudes” and from above, in the “gumbo limbo spiritual” of “Ain’t Talkin’.” Recall Dylan’s anger, expressed in the 2012 Mikal Gilmore interview, at the idea that he betrayed anyone with his 1965 return to electric music or in his “borrowings” from other artists.
Here’s what happens next:
The following day in the afternoon, a storm rushed out of the mountains — a Colorado zephyr, a katabatic wind. Walking to the café was like running in water. Lightning had ignited a wildfire in the foothills between Sunshine and Boulder Canyons. I gazed up at it and it gazed back, a flaming eye over the city. Night fell as I walked home and the wind drove harder. Trashcans and debris hurtled down the alley as I scurried to my door. Where did birds hide on such a night?
I sat on my bed in the small, paint-spattered room, listening to Dylan off a scratchy bootleg cassette, singing “She’s Your Lover Now.”
“Pain sure brings out the best in people, doesn’t it?”
…
The storm howled outside. I picked up Four Quartets, the slim volume of poetry that Marie had given me nearly a decade earlier that had often guided me with sublime vision and uncomfortable truth. One passage, from “Little Gidding,” drew my gaze and I read it aloud, over and over again, like a chant:
“The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre—
To be redeemed from fire by fire”
I read it aloud like an incantation.
“Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire”
Late in the evening I went back outdoors into the tumult. In the center of Pine Street I looked west, eight blocks to Molly’s house and several miles to the fiercely illuminated canyon. I flung my arms into the oncoming gale and screamed.
In the night, I awoke to a quiet house. The air had calmed …
The phone rang mid-morning and kept on until I crawled out to answer it. It was Rich.
“Steven, did you hear?”
“What?”
“Molly got crushed by a tree last night.”
“What? Jesus. What do you mean? Jesus. Is she okay?”
“I guess she’ll be alright but she’s pretty beat up. Her friend is in worse shape — broke his back.”
“Oh man. Oh Jesus. Who? A Swiss kid?”
“No, some guy from Niwot. I guess they’d been seeing each other. Carin told me. They were wrapped together, looking at the fire, and that huge maple in front of the house snapped off and smashed them; took a few hours to get them out.”
“Oh fuck. Oh man. Did I do it?”
“What?”
“Was it me?”
“What the hell are you talking about, Steven? No, you didn’t do it! A fucking tree did it! The wind did it!”
“Of course. Shit. Thanks for calling, man.”
“Hey, take it easy, Steven. I’m sorry, man. Take it easy.”
I read a quote in the paper the next day, from someone who’d been up in the canyon: “The roar was the loudest sound I had ever heard. It was an awesome sound, dynamic because the whole sky was roaring like a blast furnace … the fire had a spiritual quality, like seeing Buddha or Jesus Christ. It had an angelic form to it, a consciousness.”
Eliot wrote “Little Gidding” while he performed fire watch on the streets of London during the Blitz in 1940 and 1941. My two grandfathers resided in the East End in those years, near the docks, the most heavily bombed area of the city, and they performed the same duty. My father, a boy of seventeen and eighteen, also helped with the watch while studying engineering at technical school. All of them spent nights in backyard Andersen shelters and days walking through rubble and exploded clouds of plaster. My mother had been evacuated to the countryside but returned to her West Ham row house for the final bombings of the war, the V-1 and V-2 rockets.
“The dove descending” is an image of the spirit of Jesus entering his apostles at the Pentecost. It is also an allusion to German bombers over London, letting fly their weapons of fiery death. Eliot unites these things under the banner of “Love.” He suggests that the fire of suffering, through sin and mortality, and the fire of purification, through the compassion of Christ and repentance, are inseparable.
Here is Acts 2, 1-6, describing the descent of the Holy Spirit:
And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the spirit gave them utterance
Recall how Dylan alludes to the Pentecostal fire in “Murder Most Foul”:
Wolfman, oh wolfman, oh wolfman, howl
Rub a dub dub — it’s murder most foul
Wolfman Jack, he’s speaking in tongues
He’s going on and on at the top of his lungs
Play me a song, Mr. Wolfman Jack
Again, the songs contain a spiritual power. The “Hindu rituals,” released into the world, create a “mighty rushing wind.”
Eliot’s “shirt of flame” is a tunic given to Hercules by his wife Dejanira that had the power of poisoning her husband should he be unfaithful. When this comes to pass, Hercules, in pain and knowing he is doomed, builds a pyre and immolates himself. Who wove this shirt? According to Eliot, “Love.”
And according to Dylan, from “False Prophet,” in a more Old Testament mode:
I ain’t no false prophet - I just said what I said
I’m here to bring vengeance on somebody’s head
“Everything’s flowing, all at the same time.” And within that flow, in the career of the songwriter, live performance is crucial. The “ritual” of words sung, words recited aloud, have a physical effect in the universe, if they are words of power. And who created those words? Who owns them?
Here’s one last item of interest related to ritual, that I also referred to briefly at the end of Chapter Two. Dylan, in his book The Philosophy of Modern Song, tells of another song he believes has spiritual power:
The greatest of the prayer songs is the Lord’s Prayer.
In the period of my memoir I have been describing here—“Katabatic Wind”—I grow despondent. In the last scene, I walk in the mountains, intending, if I can find the courage or the cowardice, to kill myself. First, I kneel on the rocky ground:
I prayed for friends … And for Dylan, always standing in the shadows on the path ahead. Then I said:
“Our father, who art in heaven
Hallowed be thy name
Thy Kingdom come
Thy will be done,
On earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread,
And forgive us our trespasses,
As we forgive those who trespass against us.
Lead us not into temptation,
But deliver us from evil.
For thine is the kingdom
and the power and the glory
for ever and ever
Amen”
When I raised my head, I saw three angels — three smears of clear light — on the low ridge opposite. We looked at each other for ages. I could hear them with my eyes.
They said: Don’t you dare. You stay here.
For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory
Go tell it on the Mountain, go tell the real story
— “Goodbye Jimmy Reed”